The Beatles

by Steve Turner

I’VE GOT A FEELING

  ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ was again two unfinished songs strung together, this time Paul’s ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ and John’s ‘Everybody’s Had A Hard Year’. Paul’s song, optimistic as ever, was presumably written for Linda just to tell her that she was the girl he’d always been looking for. John’s song was a litany where every line began with the word ‘everybody’.

  John had indeed been through a hard year. His marriage to Cynthia had ended, he was separated from his son Julian, Yoko had suffered a miscarriage, he had been arrested on a charge of drug possession and he reckoned his personal fortune had dwindled to about £50,000.

  During the filming of Let It Be, John ran through ‘Everybody Had A Hard Year’ and said, somewhat tongue in cheek, that it was something he had started writing the night before. If this were true, it would date the song’s origin to January 1969, but there is BBC film of him shot in December 1968, where he is singing the song with an acoustic guitar in the garden of his Ascot home.

  THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD

  Like ‘Yesterday’, ‘The Long And Winding Road’ evokes loss without describing any specific situation. The images of wind and rain suggest feelings of being abandoned in the wilderness, while the long and winding road leading to ‘her door’ is the sign of hope.

  The imagery actually comes from Paul’s experience of staying at High Park, his farm in Scotland, which is exposed to high winds and frequently lashed with rain. The long and winding road itself is the B842, over twenty five miles of twists and turns which runs down the east coast of Kintyre into Campbeltown, the nearest town to the farm.

  Paul has said that he had the voice of Ray Charles in mind when he wrote it and that this influenced the use of jazzy chords. The road he envisaged as an endless road because the song is about what is eventually unattainable.

  It was released as a single in America in May 1970 and reached the Number 1 spot.

  ONE AFTER 909

  ‘One After 909’ could well be the oldest Lennon and McCartney song ever to be recorded by the Beatles. It was one of ‘over a hundred songs’ which they often talked about having written before recording ‘Love Me Do’ and goes back to that time together at Forthlin Road.

  The Beatles first recorded ‘One After 909’ in March 1963 during the same session which produced ‘From Me To You’ but George Martin was so unimpressed with it that it had never been released. It was an attempt by John, in 1957, to write an American railroad song, after skiffle hits such as ‘Last Train To San Fernando’ by Johnny Duncan, ‘Cumberland Gap’ and ‘Rock Island Line’ by Lonnie Donegan and ‘Freight Train’ by the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group.

  “We used to sag (play truant) off school, go back to my house and the two of us would write,” Paul recalled. “There are a lot of songs from back then that we’ve never reckoned on because they’re all very unsophisticated songs…We hated the words to ‘One After 909’.”

  When they came to play around with it during the sessions there was chat between John and Paul where they mentioned how they had originally dropped it because they’d always considered the lyric illogical and unfinished.

  FOR YOU BLUE

  Completed in six takes, ‘For You Blue’ was known as ‘George’s Blues’ and on George’s original lyric sheet as ‘For You Blues’ but became ‘For You Blue’ on the album.

  George was always the Beatle most keen to develop his musical skills and it was through this that he developed close friendships with musicians as diverse as Ravi Shankar and Eric Clapton. It also led him to constantly experiment with different tunings, instruments and styles of playing.

  Written for Pattie, ‘For You Blue’ was an exercise in writing a traditional blues song. George’s only comment on it was to say: “It’s a simple 12-bar song following all the normal 12-bar principles except that it’s happy-go-lucky!”

  GET BACK

  Paul said that he’d originally written ‘Get Back’ “as a political song” and surviving demos show that he was planning a satire on the attitudes of those who felt that immigrants to Britain should be repatriated. It was to be sung from the point of view of someone who didn’t ‘dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs’ and so was urging them to ‘get back’ to where they came from, its satirical intentions could easily have been misconstrued.

  Years later, Paul was still having to field questions from journalists who’d heard bootleg editions of this version and who wondered if he’d gone through a racist period. “(The verses) were not racist at all,” he said. “If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. All our favourite people were always black.”

  By the time it was recorded, ‘Get Back’ had been transformed into a song about Jojo from Tucson, Arizona, (Linda Eastman lived for a while in Tucson) and Loretta Martin who ‘thought she was a woman, But she was another man’. No story was developed and the original ‘Get back’ chorus was retained. Because it was a rock’n’roll song, ‘Get Back’ was taken to refer to a return to musical roots and Apple’s newspaper advert which bore the slogan ‘The Beatles as nature intended’ appeared to confirm this notion. “‘Get Back’ is the Beatles’ new single,” ran the copy. “It’s the first Beatles’ record which is as live as can be, in this electronic age. There’s no electronic watchamacallit. ‘Get Back’ is a pure spring-time rock number.”

  It went on to quote Paul saying, “We were sitting in the studio and we made it up out of thin air…we started to write words there and then…when we finished it, we recorded it at Apple Studios and made it into a song to rollercoast by.”

  THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO

  ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’ – in which John related the details of his marriage to Yoko in Gibraltar and their subsequent ‘honeymoon’ – was recorded in mid-April and released before the end of May. Paul helped with the final verse. The song portrayed the couple as victims about to be ‘crucified’: the two are turned back at Southampton docks, can’t get a wedding licence in France, then they’re misunderstood as they lie in bed ‘for peace’ and laughed at when they sit in a bag.

  Something John failed to mention was the fact that they were turned back at Southampton dock not because of his notoriety but because they were trying to travel to France without passports. The plane they ‘finally made’ into Paris was not a scheduled airliner but an executive jet which John impatiently asked for when he realized that it was impossible to get married on a cross-Channel ferry.

  John’s decision to get married appeared to have been made suddenly on March 14, 1969, when he and Yoko were being driven down to Poole in Dorset to visit his Aunt Mimi. This was two days after Paul’s registry office wedding to Linda. John asked his chauffeur Les Anthony to go on into Southampton and enquire about the possibility of their being married at sea. When this was found to be impossible, John decided to go to Paris and instructed his office to come up with a way of arranging a quiet wedding there. Peter Brown discovered that this couldn’t be organized at short notice but that they could marry in Gibraltar because it was a British protectorate and John was a British citizen.

  In the end, the couple flew by private plane to Gibraltar on March 20, and went straight to the British Consulate where the registrar, Cecil Wheeler, conducted a ten-minute marriage ceremony. They were on the ground for less than an hour before taking off for Amsterdam where they had booked the Presidential Suite at the Hilton. Their stay in Amsterdam was to be an extraordinary ‘honeymoon’. Instead of requiring the usual privacy, they invited the world’s press to invade their bedroom daily between 10:00 am and 10:00 pm during which time, they said, they would be staying in bed for peace.

  Not unnaturally, the world’s press hoped that John and Yoko might be intending to consummate their marriage in public. After all, they’d exposed their naked bodies on the cover of their album Two Virgins and had recorded the heartbeat of the child that Yoko later miscarried. There seemed to be no area of their lives that they weren’t willing to turn into p
erformance art.

  To the journalists’ frustration, the sight that greeted them in suite 902 was of John and Yoko in neatly pressed pyjamas sitting bolt upright in bed doing nothing more than talking about ‘peace’. It was the perfect deal. The media had an insatiable appetite for articles about the Beatles and John would do almost anything to put over his message about peace. The Amsterdam ‘Bed In’ meant that all parties went away satisfied.

  For seven days, they lay there holding court while a stream of media people sat and asked serious questions. The coverage was incredible. They did live interviews with American radio stations, made a sixty-minute documentary for themselves and saw their faces appear on the front pages of newspapers world-wide. “Yoko and I are quite willing to be the world’s clowns, if by doing it we do some good,” said John. “For reasons known only to themselves people do print what I say. And I’m saying peace. We’re not pointing a finger at anybody. There are no good guys and bad guys. The struggle is in the mind. We must bury our own monsters and stop condemning people. We are all Christ and all Hitler. We want Christ to win. We’re trying to make Christ’s message contemporary. What would he have done if he had advertisements, records, films, TV and newspapers? Christ made miracles to tell his message. Well, the miracle today is communications, so let’s use it.”

  From Amsterdam, they went to Vienna where they stopped overnight at the Hotel Sacher and ate some of its famous Sacher Tor te (a rich chocolate cake) before watching the television premiere of their film Rape.

  On April 1, they arrived back in London and gave a press conference at the airport. John expected a hostile reception because Yoko (a foreign divorcée, no less) was not considered the ideal partner for a British Beatle. To his surprise, the welcome was warm.

  ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’ was recorded by Paul and John with Paul playing bass, piano, maracas and drums, while John played lead and acoustic guitars and sang the vocals.

  OLD BROWN SHOE

  ‘Old Brown Shoe’ was one of three songs which George made a demo of at Abbey Road on February 25, 1969. The other two were ‘Something’, a future Beatles’ single, and ‘All Things Must Pass’, the title track of his first solo album in 1970.

  The lyric had its origins in George’s religious view that we must free ourselves from the reality of the material world as it is illusory. Once absorbed into the divine consciousness, there would be no right versus wrong, body versus soul, spirit versus matter. Rather like Paul had done with ‘Hello Goodbye’, George’s words were a game based on opposites. It wasn’t a song which told much of a story and the intriguing title was pinched from a line about stepping out of ‘this old brown shoe’. (George always had a problem coming up with titles.)

  The main inspiration was musical. George had been messing around on a piano one day and hit on a chord sequence he liked. Words were added later.

  Recorded two months after being demoed, ‘Old Brown Shoe’ became the B side of ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’. Much later it was used as a track on the compilation albums Hey Jude and The Beatles 1967–1970.

  YOU KNOW MY NAME

  Released as the B side of ‘Let It Be’, ‘You Know My Name’ was the strangest single ever released by the Beatles and remains one of their least-known songs.

  It had first been recorded shortly after the completion of Sgt Pepper, after John arrived at Abbey Road wanting to record a song called ‘You Know My Name, Look Up The Number’. When Paul asked to see the lyric, John told him that was the lyric. He wanted it repeated in the style of the Four Tops’ ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There’ until it sounded like a mantra. The line was a variation on a slogan John had noticed on the front cover of the Post Office’s London telephone directory for 1967 which read; ‘You have their NAME? Look up their NUMBER.’

  For three days in May and June 1967, the Beatles worked on the song but then abandoned it until April 1969 when the track was taken out for reworking. Although John’s original idea of repeating the title phrase was adhered to, the song was transformed from a mantra into what sounded like a karaoke night in Hell, organized by the Goons or the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

  The only departure from the scripted words came when John twice asked for a big hand for ‘Denis O’Bell’, a reference to the Irish-born film producer Denis O’Dell who had been Associate Producer on A Hard Day’s Night and who had become director of Apple Films and Apple Publicity.

  None of the Beatles told O’Dell that they had referred to him in the song and so it came as a shock to him when he started receiving anonymous telephone calls at his home in St George’s Square, Pimlico.

  ABBEY ROAD

  Seven years on from their first recordings at the Abbey Road Studios, the Beatles returned for what proved to be their final sessions. Back in June 1962, they were wide-eyed provincial lads keen to make their mark on the music business. By July 1969, they had become world-weary sophisticates, their lives blighted by struggles over power and money.

  The songs on Abbey Road reflected their frustrations. They’re about legal negotiations, unpaid debts, being ripped off, bad karma and generally bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders. There was even a mock-jolly song about a silver hammer (namely Maxwell’s) that is waiting to come down hard on you just when things are starting to get better.

  Despite this mood – or perhaps because of it – Abbey Road was an outstandingly inventive farewell offering. It features two of George’s best songs, ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and ‘Something’; a standout track by John, ‘Come Together’, and a fascinating medley of half-finished songs skilfully woven together by Paul.

  George Martin remembered that after Let It Be, Paul came to him and asked him to produce a Beatles’ album with the kind of feeling they used to generate together. Martin agreed to help out if the Beatles were prepared to give him their co-operation. “That’s how we made Abbey Road. It wasn’t quite like the old days because they were still working on their old songs and they would bring in the other people to work as kind of musicians for them rather than being a team.”

  In Britain, Abbey Road was released in September 1969 and stayed at Number 1 for 18 weeks. In America, it was released in October and was at Number 1 for 11 weeks.

  COME TOGETHER

  ‘Come Together’ started life as a campaign song for Timothy Leary , when he decided in 1969 that he was going to run as governor of California against America’s future president Ronald Reagan.

  Leary and his wife Rosemary were invited up to Montreal, where John and Yoko were between the sheets for another major ‘bed in’ on the 19th floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. They arrived on June 1, 1969, and were promptly roped into singing on the chorus of ‘Give Peace A Chance’, which was recorded in the hotel bedroom. Leary and his wife were rewarded for their participation by having their names included in the lyric.

  The next day, John asked Leary if there was anything that he could do to help him in his campaign and was asked if he could write a song to be used in commercials and performed at rallies. Leary’s slogan was ‘come together, join the party’ – the ‘come together’ part coming from the I Ching, the Chinese book of changes. “There was obviously a double meaning there,” said Leary. “It was come together and join the party – not a political party but a celebration of life.”

  John immediately picked up his guitar and began building on the phrase: ‘Come together right now, Don’t come tomorrow, Don’t come alone, Come together right now over me, All that I can tell you, Is you gotta be free.’ After coming up with a few more versions along the same lines, he made a demo tape and handed it to Leary.

  Leary had the song played on alternative radio stations throughout California and began to think of it as his own. However, unknown to him, John had returned to England and within seven weeks had recorded a version with the Beatles. In October, it was released on the flip side of ‘Something’, the first single to be taken from Abbey Road.

  Leary’s campaign to become governor of California
came to an abrupt halt in December 1969, when he was charged with possessing marijuana and eventually imprisoned. It was while in prison that Leary first heard Abbey Road on a local rock station and ‘ Come Together’ came as a complete surprise. “Although the new version was certainly a musical and lyrical improvement on my campaign song, I was a bit miffed that Lennon had passed me over this way… When I sent a mild protest to John, he replied with typical Lennon charm and wit that he was a tailor and I was a customer who had ordered a suit and never returned. So he sold it to someone else.”

  The recorded version was largely made up in the studio, the swampy New Orleans bass having been added by Paul. Two of the song lines referring to ‘old flat top’ were lifted from Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ and John was later sued for plagiarism. It was hard to deny where the words had come from, although, in this new context, they were nothing more than an affectionate nod towards the music of his youth. John strenuously denied any musical theft.

  The conflict was resolved when John promised to record three songs belonging to the publisher of ‘ You Can’t Catch Me’. He fulfilled this promise when he recorded Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ for his Rock’n’Roll album and Lee Dorsey’s ‘Ya Ya’ on Walls and Bridges.

  SOMETHING

  ‘Something’ was the first Beatles’ A side to be written by George. Its sources of inspiration were Ray Charles, who he imagined singing it, and a 1968 album track by James Taylor titled ‘Something In The Way She Moves’, and his wife Pattie.

  James Taylor, an American, was signed to the Apple label and his eponymous first album was produced by Peter Asher between July and October 1968. Paul played bass on one track. ‘Something In The Way She Moves’ was the last track on the first side of the album and the opening lines were: ‘There’s something in the way she moves, Or looks my way or calls my name, That seems to leave this troubled world behind.’